This is about rock piles and stone mound sites in New England. A balance is needed between keeping them secret and making them public. Also arrowheads, stone tools and other surface archaeology.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

North of Frederick's Corner, Dunstable - another look

Back to exploring, east of where I found a Wachusett Tradition mound (click here) a week ago. I figured: once a good slope, always a good slope. Last time here I saw several very large piles of rock that might have been mounds but were certainly used recently to dump rocks from the properties uphill. That turns out to be pretty much the norm for this slope. You see mounds, and you see mess, and you cannot be sure if the mounds are just part of the mess or not. But the ambiguity was particularly confusing on this visit.

As soon as I stepped out of the tangle of growth between the road and the woods, I found a perfect two chambered mound. It is big, overgrown and hard to make out in this photo which is foreshortened, so let me explain it using a sketch. A bird's eye view is something like this, a familiar shape (eg see here):The mound is outlined with a retaining wall made of larger boulders and is filled with smaller sized rocks. A large single chamber fills a square portion (on left in sketch) and a smaller chamber is included in the adjacent section (on the right). A large piece of quartz decorates the retaining wall of the smaller chamber:Here is another view. The quartz is visible in the foreground near the center of the photo. Here is a video:

A short stretch of stone wall leads up to the mound, stopping short. Here, looking downhill from the mound:This mound was the big find of the day. I continued downhill and eastward and came to other places where the rocks could have been discarded from farming, or perhaps something more:At the bottom of the hill along the side of the brook (Black Brook) was another site, on the slope still further east was a small marker pile site. I'll show those sites later.